The Company Founder Was…a Quirky Man

I read a lot of cartoon books. The one wall of my studio is almost entirely covered in cartoon collections going back probably 75 years.

They’re a great source of inspiration, and a terrific way to jumpstart my brain when I need to write. After reading a bunch of Chon Day, Henry Martin, or Peter Arno, you find yourself looking at things differently and slipping more gently into the rhythm of a good caption.

This cartoon came after flipping past one of those “statue-of-a-great-man-in-the-park” cartoons. There’s a lot of ways to do that – boring man, pigeons, great man doing something terrible – but then this twist on it hit me.

Normally I run captions past my wife to test them out. But this one, I drew up first because it’s mostly a visual gag. She said, “It’s weird, but it made me laugh.” And that’s good enough for me.

Don’t they always portray the owner in some way? If they don’t portray him in a rather quirky way, it can be an extremely serious or extremely strict persona. So I think this is already good. Quirky is good.

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